The wool-buyer hesitated with a puzzled look. "No," he said, slowly; "Stephen Holmes is not miserly. I've knowed him since a boy. To buy place, power, perhaps, eh? Yet not that, neither," he added, hastily. "We think a sight of him out our way, (self-made, you see,) and would have had him the best office in the State before this, only he was so cursedly indifferent." "Indifferent, yes. No man cares much for stepping-stones in themselves," said Vandyke, half to himself. "Great fault of American society, especially in the West," said the young aristocrat. "Stepping-stones lie low, as my reverend friend suggests; impudence ascends; merit and refinement scorn such dirty paths,"--with a mournful remembrance of the last dime in his waistcoat-pocket. "But do you," exclaimed the farmer, with sudden solemnity, "do you understand this scheme of Knowles's? Every dollar he owns is in this mill, and every dollar of it is going into some castle in the air that no sane man can comprehend." "Mad as a March hare," contemptuously muttered the doctor. His reverend friend gave him a look,--after which he was silent. "I wish to the Lord some one would persuade him out of it," persisted the wool-man, earnestly looking at the attentive face of his listener. "We can't spare old Knowles's brain or heart while he ruins himself. It's something of a Communist fraternity: I don't know the name, but I know the thing." Very hard common-sense shone out of his eyes just then at the clergyman, whom he suspected of being one of Knowles's abettors. "There's two ways for 'em to end. If they're made out of the top of society, they get so refined, so idealized, that every particle flies off on its own special path to the sun, and the Community 's broke; and if they're made of the lower mud, they keep going down, down together,--they live to drink and eat, and make themselves as near the brutes as they can. It isn't easy to believe, Sir, but it's true. I have seen it. I've seen every one of them the United States can produce. It's FACTS, Sir; and facts, as Lord Bacon says, 'are the basis of every sound speculation.'" The last sentence was slowly brought out, as quotations were not exactly his forte, but, as he said afterwards,--"You see, that nailed the parson." The parson nodded gravely. "You'll find no such experiment in the Bible," threw in the young doctor, alluding to "serious things" as a peace-offering to his reverend friend. "One, I believe," dryly.